Full details of new, 70-track Oval album revealed

Written by FACT Team on Monday, May 24

Earlier this year, glitch music pioneer and general ’90s experimental touchstone, Markus ‘Oval‘ Popp, announced his return with a new single and album for Thrill Jockey.

We now have details of that album. Titled simply O, as opposed to Oh, which is the title of the EP that will precede it (scheduled for a June release), it features 70 new cuts from Popp over a double LP/CD.RA report that “despite their overtly avant-garde titles–not to mention their whopping tracklists–both records supposedly show a less cerebral side of Popp, emphasizing fundamentals like “scales, harmonics and melody… instead of theory and meta-discourse.”

“O will be available as a double CD and a double LP, though both have slightly different tracklists: on the vinyl release, Disc 1 of the CD is spread across the first three sides, while the fourth will feature six exclusive bonus tracks. To make up the difference, the LP will come with a download coupon that includes the entire CD release.”

Oval started as a three-piece, with Markus flanked by Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzger, but has been a solo project since 1995. Their music embraced the failure of digital equipment, deliberately allowing their sounds to fragment and warp due to time and mutilation, and releases came on labels such as Thrill Jockey, Mille Plateaux and Sub Rosa. The last Oval album was in 2001.

Popp himself states that “after years of dissection and denial I wanted to try making ‘real’ music for a change. The design goals for the short side B tracks were to attain the sense of a familiar sound and ‘ringtone’. While it took me years to get the tech aspect down, the tracks themselves are pretty much recorded live and from here, I am very much looking forward to evolving this setup like a real band.”

You can hear a cut from Ohhere. The tracklist and artwork for O (that’s the album, not the EP remember) can be found below.